Although I would be very disappointed if there isn't a public api for hubski at some point in the future, you don't need a public api to keep track of the top, say, 20 users on the site. I find that interesting, and since I follow most of those users anyway, when that list was removed from the community tab, I simply made a little text file in notepad that I manually update once a week or so. Perhaps it won't be a third party website, perhaps it will be a greasemonkey extension similar to RES. People love analyzing data, and just because you try to hide it from them doesn't mean they aren't going to find it anyway.

I'm surprised you're making the censorship argument, actually. You want to remove something from everyone because... why, exactly? Discourage people from treating the followers list like karma? How is that relevant at all? If you think someone is doing that, ignore them. mk originally removed tags because he didn't want them to turn into subreddits. He brought them back because... they won't. I wish mk would bring back the list of popular users, too, if only so I wouldn't have to waste a few moments of my time doing it manually. Hubski is fundamentally different from reddit. Followers won't turn into karma, you can't "cheat" followers, there is no hivemind here to cater to, you either submit things people like and gain followers, or you don't.

I think we should be adding features, not taking them away. If someone doesn't like a feature, they can ignore it. Plan and simple.